James Mangold On "Heavy," 1995
"Heavy Mettle: Lyrical Reality In James Mangold’s Debut"
I had a good reaction to my first exposure to Heavy. This is a slightly edited version of a 1995 interview.
Some movies I forget, others I see a second time, a few take hold right away and the images and faces seep into memories. Heavy has stayed with me. Some writers have shrugged it off as derivative of other movies, a sub-Paddy Chayefsky retread of Marty or something that condescends to the working-class characters, but that's not the movie I saw. James Mangold's debut feature, a thing of exquisite beauty, is a film of tender regard that manages even to bring an honorable smile from reaction shots of a pop-eyed Boston terrier. Some writers called it slow, others failed to take on its emotional heft. Heavy is more patient than slow, lovely if you fall into its graceful dance of longings expressed through reverse angles and eyeline matches, with a nourishing sense of composition that embraces its characters. And in its telling, some scenes have a sense of surprise, even of inevitability.
There's the high-octane, technically proficient style of what most people think of American late twentieth century cinema, the kind of hyper-energized Spielbergian, Scorsesian work. Then there's this actor's cinema, which is a lazy camera covering great performances.
A student of Milos Forman, Mangold, on the evidence of his first feature, seems more concerned about day's passing light than the progression of plot, the meeting of eyes rather than plot elements. Taylor Pruitt Vince, superb in small parts in movies such as Nobody's Fool, is a quiet, overweight man who cooks at a tavern in upstate New York owned by his mother (Shelley Winters). While he might dream of attending the nearby Culinary Institute of America, mom reassures him, You're a cook already, remain part of my routine, make the pizzas. Like barfly Joe Grifasi and waitress Deborah Harry, they're part of the well-worn scenery. Comes summer, he meets college dropout Liv Tyler, wanting to become a photographer or maybe just run away with or run away from boyfriend Evan Dando. She doesn't know. But when the heavy man begins to watch the coltish girl, he could imagine time spent near her, her eyes observing him with the same dewy-eyed affection with which he observes her.
Mangold, 32, grew up in upstate New York, child of two successful artists. He's halfway through shooting the sixty days of his second feature in New York, Cop Land, an ambitious variation on Western themes, with Sylvester Stallone as an honest cop, meek and hearing-impaired, who battles the department's corruption, epitomized by Robert DeNiro. We tried to talk before the movie's release, and I finally caught up with him on a Sunday night as he drove from one errand to another through Manhattan, a pace different from the gentle rhythm of Heavy.
Heavy doesn't seem like a response to Hollywood, but more its own animal. "Right," Mangold says, "It's not a response to anything. From a purely artistic point of view, it's an exploration of an alternative rhythm. To me, there's the high-octane, technically proficient style of what most people think of American late twentieth century cinema, the kind of hyper-energized Spielbergian, Scorsesian work. Then there's this actor's cinema, which is a lazy camera covering great performances. A big inspiration for me to find something other than that was that at a late date, I discovered the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and really found this touchstone of formal design that remains incredibly laid back. The design and the filmmaking were really at one with the idea of capturing naturalistic performances."
. "Men are more troubled by the movie.
Men find it depressing. Women find it inspiring.”
Mangold's storytelling is built as much on images as dialogue, with some passages resting on the exchange of glances. "That was a second goal, to make a silent film!" he says. "I'm big on creating a rigorous challenge for myself, which may be completely outside the film. In this case, I wanted to tell the story without words. I wanted the characters to be not so in touch with their feelings, they wouldn't even flounder about trying. The world I grew up in wasn't a world of people in therapy in touch with their problems, nor was it a world where people sat around a barbecue struggling to identify their problems. They just never talked about it. Cinematically, it was also very exciting to say that I was going to make a movie that tried to look at the spaces between things."
Mangold's triumph is that the film doesn't grow as ponderous as that statement seems, although reactions to the film have been divided. "Men are more troubled by the movie," Mangold says. "Men find it depressing. Women find it inspiring. But for me, this movie is such a personal confection, it gives me an inoculation against the criticism. When I hear people wanting more to have happened, I just want to say, 'That was the whole point. I wanted to make a movie where you might be moved by someone who moves an inch. One of my spiels is that a lot of movies take someone from possibility to triumph, or from possibility to tragedy. 'Heavy' moves someone from no possibility to possibility. That's a very small distance, but in the real world, it's a humongous distance. Still, my intention was never to test an audience with some insane minimalist plot; it was really about following through on these central ideas of making a calm, soothing, tender, assured film that didn't try to compete with what in independent film at that moment was ruled by Tarantino—highly verbal, incredibly sardonic."
Mangold has a theory of what that style derives from, and it came back to haunt him. "A lot of it stems from one of the great cultural forces of our time, which is Dave Letterman. The result is this cinema where no one means anything, where everything is a Top Ten list, and no one loves anyone, and no one believes anything. Nothing is meant. It's almost another kind of silent cinema, because words become so completely irrelevant. I wanted to make something really, really heart-on-sleeve true and I knew from the moment I was doing it that some people would go, 'What a drippy, gooey, oozy...' Then it comes full circle. A-month-and-a-half ago, Liv is on Letterman and keeps trying to tell him about Heavy, and he keeps going, 'Yeah, but it's about a fat guy who falls in love with you, right?' She's saying, 'Nooooo! It's much more than that!'
“This whole argument I'd constructed in my head in the bowels of my upstate bedroom four years ago had come full circle to actually confront the center of my philosophy. There it all was, being argued out on national television." He pauses, and the sound of New York City traffic fills the line.
"Heavy" is playing at Pipers Alley. [Pipers Alley closed in May 2011.]